Registering my displeasure
The hot topic of the day would appear to be newspaper sites that require visitors to register before allowing them to read any articles. Wired is running a story which ties in nicely with last week’s article about The New York Times and its lousy pagerank.
Jeff Veen points out that visitors will view the registration process as damage and find a way to route around it. Simon Willison is also on the case.
The unanimous verdict is that registration is annoying, dangerous and, given the copious of amounts of fake data, a complete waste of time. One positive aspect about the whole debate is that it’s generating plenty of publicity for a tremendously useful site called BugMeNot which stores and retrieves usernames and passwords in order to bypass the registration process.
I came up with a little bookmarklet for the site. You can drag this link to your toolbar:
Whenever you come across an article that requires registration, you can click on that link to query BugMeNot’s database for a username and password.
I thought I was being very clever until I realised that there’s already a bookmarklet on the front page of the BugMeNot site. Doh!
Tuesday, July 20th, 2004 2:23pm
Illustrations
Thanks to the magic of machine tags, you can illustrate this post by tagging a picture on Flickr with:
